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Hunger in America 2010 Illinois State Report

This report presents information on the clients and agencies in the state of Illinois. The information is drawn from a national study, Hunger in America 2010, conducted in 2009 for Feeding America (FA) (formerly America's Second Harvest), the nation's largest organization of emergency food providers. The national study is based on completed in-person interviews with more than 62,000 clients served by the FA national network, as well as on completed questionnaires from more than 37,000 FA agencies. The study summarized below focuses on emergency food providers and their clients who are supplied with food by food banks in the FA network.

Key Findings:

The FA system in Illinois provides emergency food for an estimated 1,451,400 different people annually.

42% of the members of client households in Illinois are children under 18 years old (Table 5.3.2).

38% of client households include at least one employed adult (Table 5.7.1).

Among client households with children, 83% are food insecure and 42% are food insecure with very low food security (Table 6.1.1.1).

50% of clients in Illinois report having to choose between paying for food and paying for utilities or heating fuel (Table 6.5.1).

34% had to choose between paying for food and paying for medicine or medical care (Table 6.5.1).

32% of client households in Illinois report having at least one household member in poor health (Table 8.1.1)

At the administration of this survey, 8 food banks or FROs affiliated with FA operated in Illinois. Of the agencies that were served by those organizations, 1,387 agencies that had their operation within the state responded to the agency survey. Of the responding agencies, 1,104 had at least one food pantry, soup kitchen, or shelter.

70% of pantries, 57% of kitchens, and 39% of shelters are run by faith-based agencies affiliated with churches, mosques, synagogues, and other religious organizations (Table 10.6.1).

Among programs that existed in 2006, 88% of pantries, 67% of kitchens, and 64% of shelters in Illinois reported that there had been an increase since 2006 in the number of clients who come to their emergency food program sites (Table 10.8.1).

Food banks are by far the single most important source of food for agencies with emergency food providers, accounting for 69% of the food distributed by pantries, 50% of the food distributed by kitchens, and 48% of the food distributed by shelters (Table 13.1.1).

As many as 96% of pantries, 83% of kitchens, and 74% of shelters in Illinois use volunteers (Table 13.2.1).